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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Stars
Ideas
Constellations
Translated
Objects

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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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